Why We Crave Horror Movies

Horror Movies

So many great horror movies have been made over the years that choosing eight is difficult, although the best of them all have certain elements in common that makes viewers crave them, and often leads to many sequels. If the same formula works once, then movie directors and producers will use it repeatedly with slight variations, and this happens with all vampire, zombie, werewolf, and slasher/psycho killer films. Any great horror film has to take basically ordinary people and throw them into a situation where they are confronted with evil or monsters of some kind. These characters must be sympathetic enough that the audience will identify with them and hope that they will finally overcome the monsters, a plot device as old as the heroic Beowulf confronting the dragon Grendel. Of course, many of the characters will not survive the conflict and sometimes none of them do. At least as important, the monsters must be sufficiently frightening and dangerous that the heroes face a real struggle for survival, although sometimes the monsters might also have a sympathetic or human side, as do many vampires and werewolves, for example. Even more interesting are horror movies in which the heroes also confront evil within themselves, or risk being transformed into monsters, which is a staple of vampire, zombie, alien, and demonic possession movies. No horror film will ever work well without sufficiently menacing monsters, just as no drama succeeds without villains or antagonists.

Zombie pictures have been one of the most popular horror genres of the last forty years, and the creatures have gradually become faster, hungrier and deadlier. In George Romero's very low-budget film Night of the Living Dead (1968), which has spawned many imitations and sequels over the years, a group of ordinary people are trapped in a farmhouse surrounded by zombies. This film reflects the tensions and fears of the Vietnam War era, with a black man and the young people left in the upstairs of the house to fight the monsters while a middle class couple hides in the basement. Only the black man survives in the end, only to be killed by a posse of rednecks led by the sheriff. Dawn of the Dead (1978), is Romero's critique of consumer culture in which the heroes escape from the city and end up hiding in a shopping mall, where the zombies are still wandering around as if they were shoppers. Indeed, the zombies finally take over the mall and the few surviving humans have to find another place to hide. At least as frightening was the British film 28 Days Later (2002), in which the zombies take over London and the few surviving humans run away to the countryside, only to encounter a group of violent and dangerous soldiers who are at least as bad as the monsters. This film ends with the zombies finally starving to death, and the surviving people are allowed to return to Britain, although in the sequels the virus that turns humans into zombies spreads all over the world.

One of the greatest tricks in horror films is to make the monster invisible or formless, or refrain from showing it in its full evil until the end. The Blair Witch Project (1999) takes three ordinary college students doing a film project on a witch that supposedly lived deep in the forest in Maryland, and then sends them on a journey like Hansel and Gretel into the haunted woods until they finally arrive at the witch's house. Filmed on a very minimal budget with no special effects, and no (visible) monster, the terror of this film is emotional and psychological, and in the end none of the characters survive. John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) features an alien in Antarctica that can assume any shape it wants, which creates at atmosphere of extreme tension and paranoia on the base as none of the humans know if the person next to them has been taken over. Although the alien simply wants to build a spaceship and escape, the humans are determined to prevent this and finally destroy the entire station, so that no one can survive. Part of the genius of the original Alien film (1979) was that the monsters was largely kept hidden in the shadows until the end and the crew of the spaceship only had brief glimpses of the thing that was wiping them out, although it was truly one of the scariest and most persistent monsters in any movie. It kills the entire crew, and even when the heroine blows up the ship and flees in an escape craft still has one more try at her. These reptilian aliens also take over human bodies to breed even more of their kind, and can literally destroy entire worlds.

In some horror films, the enemy is literally within, such as Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973). In the first one, an ordinary yuppie couple in New York move into an apartment building controlled by witches, and to advance his career Rosemary's husband makes a deal with the Devil so that his wife will give birth to the Antichrist. Only very gradually does Rosemary come to realize the truth, but the conspiracy is so total that she can do nothing about it. In The Exorcist, a little girl from a single-parent family is possessed by the Devil, who can change her appearance and make her look and speak like a thing of pure evil. Her mother does not even believe God or the Devil, but after all medical and psychiatric help feels, she turns to the church to save her daughter. Of course, the Devil is so persistent and determined that he kills one of the exorcists while the other takes him into himself then jumps out the window rather than harm the little girl.

All of these films had the right combinations of frightening monsters and ordinary people as victims that they inspired numerous imitations, although rarely were they as great as the originals. Of course, some of these films were inspired by earlier ones from the classic horror and science fiction era of the 1940s and 1950s, such as The Thing from Outer Space. Most of these earlier horror and science fiction thrillers were B-movies rather than major studio productions, although these genres have always been open to independent and low-budget films as well, of which The Blair Witch Project and Night of the Living Dead are excellent examples.